Good Visual Perception
What do you know about visual perception? This is connected with your eye and of course we should concern about this. Understanding the basic construction of the eye goes some way to explaining the physical mechanism of vision but visual perception is more than this. The information received by the visual apparatus must be filtered and passed to processing elements which allow us to recognize coherent scenes, disambiguate relative distances and differentiate color. We will consider some of the capabilities and limitations of visual processing later, but first we will look a little more closely at how we perceive size and depth, brightness and color, each of which is crucial to the design of effective visual interfaces. Imagine you are standing on a hilltop. Beside you on the summit you can see rocks, sheep and a small tree. On the hillside is a farm house with outbuildings and farm vehicles. Someone is on the track, walking towards the summit. Even in describing such a scene the notions of size and distance predominate. Our visual system is easily able to interpret the images which it receives to take account of these things. We can identify similar objects regardless of the fact that they appear to us to be of vastly different sizes. In fact, we can use this information to judge distances.
